Shadow of Mordor – Gabe McCauley

I spent a good part of a year working on Shadow of Mordor as a Level Designer. During my time there I got to work on some of the areas in Udun, script a few Power Struggle missions, and otherwise make up excuses for why I should get paid to kill orcs all day.

Uruks Hollow

Much of my time was devoted to working on Uruk’s Hollow. I worked on the initial layout and prototyping of the area, and worked with several teams to develop it during my time there. Building gameplay on multiple levels and making sure all the core stealth and combat systems played well together was an awesome challenge. Now that the game is out its amazing to see people playing around and having fun in an area I worked on.

Here are a some shots of the area. Props to all the artists who made this look so good and let me play with a super fancy Lego set. Hope you enjoy actually playing the game

I was also responsible for managing the sandbox AI population within Uruk’s Hollow during my time there. This included placing all necessary spawners, nodes, and scripted assets, and making sure that they interacted correctly on both High and Low alert statuses. This was a great learning experience as i got to work with scripts and assets made by other designers and engineers, and work to solve problems that were beyond my own capacity to fix.

Power Struggles

I also prototyped some of the Power Snuggle missions including the Hunt, Recruitment, and Trial. My primary responsibility was developing the mission scripts, and I worked with several teams to improve upon the scenarios while i was there. Each event had to be able to be customized to fit the area they took place in, but it was also important to keep everything modular, so that the same event could be deployed in multiple places.

Scripted Assets

Some of the work i did included the creation of scripted assets such as the Caragor cage. It was really cool to see the whole process with that asset as it moved from my original blockout into production. I worked with several artists, engineers and designers to determine design requirements, fix bugs with the implementation, and otherwise make as bulletproof an asset as possible. Seeing as how ubiquitously it is used in the game now, i’m pretty proud of how we did.

Sandbox AI Scripting

I also got a chance to do some early work on a few ambient events. One of my favorites is a script that spawns a Caragor(s) and a target into the level. By allowing the target to run to a random point in the map after spawning in, it gives the player an understandable scenario that plays out in front of them whether they decide to intervene or not.